a bleeding purple utah jazz blog

Quick Hits Odds and Ends

1. I was talking to my friend (a Warriors fan) a couple of days ago about the Jazz logo change, and he was saying how he hates it when teams create all this hoopla about changing their logo, and the new logo ends up being barely different than the old one. Apparently, some non-Jazz fans aren’t aware that we stopped using the J-note logo for 15 years. To me, this shows that the decision to go back to the J-note was the right one, because it is instantly recognized as the Jazz logo, 15 years of hibernation or no.

3. RIP Manute Bol. His passing is all the more sad considering all the good he did, and how he disregarded his image and reputation to earn money to help his people. He achieved so much considering how he lost his mom at a young age and worked as a cowherd as a boy.

Way back in the early 90s, ESPN wasn’t yet available in my neck of the woods and and we could only get Sportscenter highlights (not highlights shown by Sportscenter, but highlights of Sportscenter) during a sports news program broadcast on a Japanese cable network. Needless to say, we couldn’t understand a word of it, but one of the highlights that sticks in my mind to this day is the game in which Manute hit 6 threes in one half, and (former teammate but opponent for the night) Charles Barkley hugging him. You just couldn’t help but cheer for him.

Per Wikipedia: “My mother was 6 feet 10, my father 6 feet 8 and my sister is 6 feet 8,” he said. “And my great-grandfather was even taller –7 feet 10.” (I was watching a video about him on youtube yesterday and he said that his grandfather, the chief of their tribe, was 7’10” and had 57 wives.) The Bol family makes the Yao family (6’7″ father, 6’3″ mother, 7’6″ son) look short lol.

5. David Stern rubs me the wrong way much of the time. One particular quote from his NBA Finals press conference didn’t help:

“[The top free agents] can have [a free agency summit],” he said. “I was wondering whether they would get together, eight players and they’ll all look at D-Wade’s ring? They’d be better off watching these finals to see how you construct a team and how you play and the like. There’s not going to be a summit.”

First of all, if the players are going to have a summit, I hardly think they’d feel the need to inform Stern. Second, the part about “They’d be better off watching these finals to see how you construct a team” really pissed me off. Who was in the Finals? The Lakers. And how were the Lakers constructed? By you allowing LAL to pluck Gasol from Memphis and speeding off without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror. So F your highhanded smugness.